The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics
In 2016, Professors of English and poets Dawn Lundy Martin and Terrance Hayes co-founded the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) at the University of Pittsburgh. A creative think tank for African American and African diasporic poetry and poetics, CAAPP brings together a diversity of poets, writers, scholars, artists, and community members who are thinking through black poetics as a field that investigates the contemporary moment as it is impacted by historical artistic and social repressions and their respondent social justice movements.
Courses in African American Literary and Cultural Studies in the English Department
ENGLIT 0515 “Contemporary African American Poetry” (LIT, W) This course explores the rich and diverse field of contemporary poetry by African Americans, which has witnessed a marked growth over the last three decades. It examines the range of styles, aesthetic projects, and concerns of contemporary black U.S. poets, including the relation of various forms of experimentation to tradition; vernacular, oral, and musical expression; questions of race, culture, and identity; globalization and diasporic movements; the individual and society. This course fulfills a First in Literature Gen Ed requirement and a Writing-emphasis Gen Ed requirement.
ENGLIT 0621 “Introduction to African-American Literature: Debates and Approaches” This course introduces students to several of the key methodological and theoretical approaches to African American literary studies today. Through a selection of primary and secondary readings, students will acquire a knowledge of a range of conceptual frameworks and critical terms that currently shape the study of African American literature. This course fulfills a First Course in Literature Gen Ed requirement.
ENGLIT 1225 “19th Century African American Literature” This course begins with the late eighteenth-century poetry and prose of authors such as Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, and ends with Civil War, Reconstruction, or Gilded-Age authors such as William Wells Brown, Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Readings include a variety of different genres of writing (slave narratives, poetry, drama, fictive and non-fictive prose), while paying attention to the significant African American intellectual and cultural movements that had a role in shaping these various literary productions.
ENGLIT 1230 “20th Century African American Literature” This course begins by briefly examining some of the major authors from the 1920s who were part of what came to be known as the “New Negro Renaissance” or “Harlem Renaissance,” such as Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston. We will then study a range of modernist and naturalist writers of the 1930s and 1940s, such as Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Gwendolyn Brooks. In the second half of the course we will focus on several post-WWII writers that were associated with the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements, from the 1950s to the 1970s, including figures such as Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Cade Bambara. Finally, we will consider the recent wave of African American writers that emerged with the popularization, in the 1980s, of several new genres of African American literature.
ENGLIT 1227 “Harlem Renaissance” (EX, HS) Throughout the 1920s, Harlem, New York was the epicenter of black artistic, cultural, literary, and intellectual innovation. Exploring this distinctive moment, this course pays particular attention to politics, cultural history, literary movements, visual culture, performance, and music as they relate to key historical events like the Great Migration, World War I, and urbanization. The course traces key themes and questions through a variety of genres, including poetry, the essay, drama, literature, photography, and art by black artists and intellectuals such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, and Jean Toomer. This course fulfills a Second Course in Lit Gen Ed requirement and a Historical Change Gen Ed requirement.